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A week later, Katharina is standing next to Rosa in a field, slicing off the heads of cauliflowers. It’s nice that they’re all together again for harvest duty, just as in their first year, in foundation. Katharina, Rosa, Uta as well, who wants to be an industrial designer, and Robert, the sculptor. Somehow it’s ridiculous, says Robert, us chopping cauliflowers, while in Berlin people are being arrested. And clack, another head goes on the conveyor belt. After the incidents of October 7 and 8, the political economy lecturer brought up the protests and spoke of “counterrevolution,” and Katharina and eight or nine others got up and walked out in the middle of the lecture. Their names are bound to be on some list now. Half an hour later, she had a lump in her throat — so moved was she by her own indignation. Clack, another one gone. Are heroic feelings just a form of vanity? And does it take death or some severe punishment to eliminate it? Clack, another one. Was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya vain? Or Julius Fučík? We lived for joy, we went into battle for the sake of joy, and we will die for it. Please do not associate our names with sadness. No, the only vain one is she. Head after cauliflower head lands on the conveyor belt that has been rigged up on the field, towards a truck. Anyone who is capable of manipulating their feelings that way is emotionally not to be trusted, Hans said to her lately, on the cassette.
love this for her
The government reacted forcefully to the commotion, but at least no shots were fired, thinks Katharina. Could it be because the so-called counterrevolutionaries reminded the ancients in power of themselves when they were young idealists? The passage of time. Strange, she thinks, that a crime is called a trespass.
THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Then she goes back into the kitchen to chop some herbs, Katharina leans on the doorjamb, can I help, no no, it’s fine. Rosa chops and talks and in between looks across at Katharina, then stops, Katharina sees the knife in Rosa’s hand, and Rosa looks at Katharina. Katharina takes a couple of steps to her friend, stops in front of her, looks at her expressionlessly, and Rosa looks at her, neither of them speaks, eye to eye, Katharina takes the knife from her friend’s hand and lays it aside, lowers her head into the hollow between neck and shoulder, blows out a little puff of breath, before she bites her friend, but her friend takes her by the hair, pulls her head up, and says: You know, I hate you sometimes for still being with Hans. Yes, says Katharina, I know. And then they fall down together. They sprawl in the corridor, then stagger into the bedroom, the referee counts to fifty thousand, but neither of them wants to end this fight which has no winner and no loser. All night, to breathe and to feel the other’s breath against her skin, or whose breath and whose skin is it? Running her tongue along the other’s teeth as against a friendly fence, feel out with her hands, her lips, her tongue what is dark and moist, listen all night to the sounds of the other, or are they her own? To know the other as herself. One being of flesh and blood joined to another, as by a key. To be one.
[...] Only when they’re drinking coffee does she notice that Hans is down. The radio station is being “restructured” as they’re calling it, but Hans doesn’t want to discuss it. He looks at her soberly, she looks soberly back. Are we finished as lovers, then? Why shouldn’t she look serious? When he told her lately, When I’m under pressure, I need tenderness from you, she shook her head at him in amusement, and that offended him. When all she meant to indicate was that she too had a right to independence and will. Are we finished as lovers? She looks at his ravaged face in January, in February, but she can’t help him. Sometimes he brushes the hair out of his eyes repeatedly in the wrong direction, without noticing. At the greengrocer’s he spends half an hour in search of frozen kale, they don’t have it here, don’t you see. But he absolutely must have his frozen kale now. He wanders around the tiny shop three more times. Are we finished as lovers?
She returns to Berlin with her sketchbook full. Welcome home, says her mother, who collects her at the station and has supper ready for her in Reinhardtstrasse. Home? Coca-Cola, she’s noticed, is now on sale in the eastern half of Friedrichstrasse station, also in Pankow in the little store where she always shops, Coca-Cola same as in New York or Munich. Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner. Is this home?
[...] Katharina and her friends drink it in the KDW department store and are mean enough to walk out without paying. Half their money and their parents’ money has been vaporized in the course of the historical reform, so are they expected on top of that to shell out as much for a piece of cake as they did once for Kant’s Eternal Peace? Do the Wessies really believe in money as a measure of worth? think the young things, and shake their heads, and their long, dangling hair worn loose shakes along, adding to the expression of their puzzlement. We’re young, let’s be beautiful too, they say, what’s the point of a lace bra when we’re old and wrinkled. Who knows if we’ll even live that long. The important thing is no sign of guilt on the face. Catch the eye of the salesperson, while the hands are busy elsewhere. And — because there is honor among thieves, and principles among shoplifters — don’t steal from small stores, where the goods and prices might mean something to the owner. But supermarkets, drugstores, chains, they’re all fair game.
If I leave my family, Hans says to Katharina, you have to promise you’ll always be with me.
If you want to be with me, then be with me. But it’s not a trade.
I don’t know what’ll happen.
You have to want it.
I can’t go into a void.
What void?
The silence lasts just one second in which at midnight between 1991 and 1992 the East German frequencies give up the ghost. Hans is sitting in front of the radio at Katharina’s and takes in the very short silence with which his past life is lopped off. It was a little like that moment in La bohème where Mimì dies, and none of her friends notices. It is his first time celebrating New Year’s with Katharina, because Ingrid has to keep company with her mother, who is poorly. Katharina is in jeans and slippers. But at least she’s sprinkled some confetti on the table and poured some Rotkäppchen. It just happens so casually, says Hans. Because dying isn’t much really. It’s just something ceasing to be.
[...] Alienated labour had four aspects to it. First, the workers were related to the product of their labour as to an alien object; it stood over and above them, opposed to them with a power independent of the producers. Second, the workers became alienated from themselves in the very act of production; for workers did not view their work as part of their real life and did not feel at home in it. Third, peoples’ ‘species-life’, their social essence, was taken away from them in their work which did not represent the harmonious efforts of people as ‘species-beings’. Fourth, individuals found themselves alienated from other individuals. [...]
in the first part of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. [...]
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. [...] Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. [...]